Background
The Royal Life Saving Society Australia (RLSSA) is one of the leading water safety organisations in Australia. Since its establishment in 1894, RLSSA has provided both accredited and non-accredited training in first aid, water safety and lifesaving to over ten million Australians. Due to increased demand for their training services over the last few years, RLSSA has faced escalating complexity in relation to achieving compliance with the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA).
Previously each state and territory branch had been maintaining a variety of databases and training management systems to try and manage this growth. But lack of uniformity led to differences in user experience. RLSSA thus saw the potential to find a product that could cater for the diverse needs of RLSSA’s training programs, while still containing a robust and compliant reporting option. Furthermore, the product needed to be flexible enough to adapt to the requirements of each individual state and territory branch, while still maintaining a consistent product across their stakeholders.
Solution
This is where aXcelerate came in. The aXcelerate student management system has the capacity to provide a comprehensive student management system that can handle all aspects of running a compliant training organisation, while being flexible enough to adapt to varying forms of training. This suited RLSSA’s requirements to a tee.
The goal for aXcelerate was to seamlessly manage and facilitate these different forms of training within the one interface, in order to maintain uniformity. To achieve this, we focused on using our task flow management and automated reporting/administration tools to increase client engagement, creating follow-ups for client leads, streamlining administration tasks and creating overall improvements in the allocation of human resources across all branches.
Being able to streamline administration tasks via our task flow management is particularly evident in regards to templates and certificates. A current role in one of RLSSA’s largest office is to focus solely on typing and printing certificates. However aXcelerate has the ability to design and create a certificate template, which allows certificates to be sent/printed in bulk. Using this tool saves this particular branch significant time and resources.
Another crucial requirement for RLSSA was developing their candidate portal. The challenge involved in creating this portal was being able to develop our existing API’s in order to achieve RLSSA’s requirements, particularly detailed workshop searching and user validation for their Single Sign On environment. Determined to find a solution, we worked together with Vortilla Digital, a leading software development company specialising in developing custom web applications to develop APIs that ‘talk’ to all three parties, are consistent across all RLSSA branches and meet all RLSSA’s portal requirements.
Looking to the future
Our development team are also undertaking extensive custom work and testing to ensure these changes work as effectively as possible in both the aXcelerate and the RLSSA database. Currently their Victorian branch have the ‘new and improved’ portal up and running, with the aim to have all other branches online by the end of May 2015.
Staff of the Victorian branch have already noticed the ease with which they can now book onto courses via their student portal and the improvement in the day-to-day administration of training, thanks to the streamlined and comprehensive task allocation provided by aXcelerate.
Since starting this project, the initial scope has changed and grown as we have better understood the needs of each key stakeholder within RLSSA and how to serve them. We look forward to continuing this partnership with RLSSA and pursuing the most effective methods to manage their training processes.